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Comment by jonfw | Hacker News Reader

An 8 gig stick of ram costs about thirty dollars. It doesn't make sense to run 4 these days.

> An 8 gig stick of ram costs about thirty dollars. It doesn't make sense to run 4 these days.

It does not make sense if 4 Gb mean that you can only run a browser and Notepad.

If, however, you are a bit older and you remember the time that you had the choice between 4 MB and 8 MB and people were still able to do all their computer stuff, including internet, in a graphical environment, then you thoughts are more in the line of: what the fuck are these lazy and incompetent programmers doing these days? And this is coming from someone who earns a living as a developer.

There were a lot of hours spent and features unimplemented those days in want of RAM. Now we don't have to do that- we can do more, and we can do stuff way faster as developers.

If you spend a half hour over the entire life of your machine even considering RAM, you might as well double it for $30.

Using RAM is good. It's fast, it's cheap, and anybody with 8 gigs has it in abundance

May I ask what unimplemented features you're referring to? I think one of the biggest issues the older crowd has with Electron apps is not only that they eat up 500MBs of RAM, but also that they only have a tiny subset of the features contained in apps that ran fine with 500KBs.

"Hello World" in Electron is 100MB. That's the bare minimum. It's quite insane.

Many (most?) consumer level machines have soldered RAM these days. They may or may not have an available expansion slot.

Not everyone can or will upgrade their computer’s RAM.

Older Intel chipsets don't support more than 4 Gb. New chipsets and motherboards also have a limitation, typically about 16 or 32 Gb. Doesn't it look artificial? What is the reason for it? Of course, to make sure that the consumer won't be able to use them for too long without paying for a new one.

Most current entry level AMD and Intel motherboards support 32 or 64 GB RAM (in fact, I couldn't find one that supported less). These are rarely over $100. Boards supporting 128GB of RAM start around $120-150.

Seems reasonable for 2019.

What about the people using prebuilt machines, or ones with 4GB of soldered-in RAM?

Thats not really what I was responding to - they were saying current chipsets and motherboards are artificially limited to 16/32GB, which isnt true. Of course there are are specific systems like laptops that are limited to less than that.

Should not "entry-level" motherboard cost around $20-40 and not $100? Not reasonable at all.

Also, in laptops you cannot upgrade the motherboard.

> Should not "entry-level" motherboard cost around $20-40 and not $100? Not reasonable at all.

No? ~$100 is remarkably cheap for a new motherboard, especially if you are complaining about needing 32+GB of RAM, which costs substantially more than $40. If you want something like a $35 Raspberry pi, buy one and accept its limitations.

I haven't seen anyone use a desktop for development in years...

The Windows tablet/notebook (hybrid) being sold as their latest product by a company I'm doing business with at the moment has 4GB. It's a shame, because Electron would totally fit what their business runs on those tablets, which is a Javascript-based graphical environment...

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